Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Wikidata and the Linked Open Data Ecosystem for the Performing Arts

@Fjjulien, Vero Marino, and Beat Estermann: Hello applicants, and thanks for your proposal for the Wikimedia Alliances Fund on behalf of CAPACOA to extend your prior work supporting performing arts information on Wikidata. The Regional Committee has been able to review the proposal and has the following feedback and questions at this stage to support their final review:

• The committee greatly appreciates the level of outreach that your team has supported in coordinating with local organizations, other partners in Canada, as well as international partners. The work of coordinating with this many organizations at once is substantial, but has clear potential for impact on your proposed goals.
• Related to the budget, the committee also appreciate the level of consideration and detail brought into the work and expenses related to doing this work on a per-item basis. This is a helpful approach to estimating these costs that incorporates the expertise and time around communications, data transformations, and other tasks to support meaningful incorporation into Wikidata.
• Some more clarity is requested around the datathons and meetings described in the proposal. Are the datathons and meetups independent activities, or do they refer to the same activity? Specifically, do you have an idea of how many of these events for you plan to run or a or a general schedule for these activities during the grant period? Could this be incorporated in the metrics table, even as an approximation?
• One regular activity you have planned is to meet regularly with performing arts communities/organizations to address modelling challenges and support their engagement with the movement. Do you have specific goals or outcomes around these meetings related to the lesson exchange / reaching certain milestones in building agreement / building more awareness around how partners can engage with the movement?
• What ethical practices around the representation of people does CAPACOA use when working together with partners as well as what information it integrates into Wikidata? For example, are there practices that could help prevent the inclusion of a former name of a transgender performing artist to avoid deadnaming and misgendering? Are there other practices you use that can help prevent other issues concerning personality rights?

We request that you respond to this feedback on the talk page before 23:00 UTC on Saturday 26 February, as we hope to finalize a funding decision for Monday, 28 February. If you have any needs for clarity, please reach out to Chris at cschillingwikimedia.org. On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Question: “Are the datathons and meetups independent activities, or do they refer to the same activity?”

Answer: The datathon and the WikiProject Performing arts meetups are two distinct types of activities.

The “datathon and other editing activities” are broad-reaching online engagement activities aimed at increasing the number of performing arts items and most especially enhancing data quality. These activities will include a one-week datathon focused on performing arts venues. We are also making plans to hold data cleaning and enrichment “clinics” following batch uploads. Both the datathon and the data enrichment activities will be targeting people with little to no prior experience with Wikidata. We will develop step-by-step guidance and we will accompany them while they learn as they edit. We tested this method on a one-on-one basis last summer, and then in a small-group setting in December. We are finding it to be a very effective strategy for introducing people to Wikidata:

• The intimidating aspects of Wikidata are counterbalanced by the keen interest that participants have in a given performing arts building, organization or artist;
• Because participants are very familiar with the item(s) that they are editing, they know where to look for accurate data points and references;
• The use of breakout rooms makes it less intimidating for participants to ask questions and to share their screens.  

So far, this method is yielding a fairly good level of retention. More than half of participants at the December event attended our following Wikidata workshop. One participant even joined our LODEPA Slack workspace and may start attending our meetups.

Meetups are video conferencing meetings that we hold to bring participants in the Wikidata WikiProject Performing arts and like-minded communities together. These quarterly meetings are opportunities to discuss community engagement strategies and to address challenges with regards to the representation of performing arts information and content in Wikidata, in Wikipedias and in Wikimedia Commons. These meetings are absolutely essential to supplement asynchronous discussions over talk pages. A ping on the WikiProject Performing arts is simply not enough to reach consensus on complex modelling challenges: we need to engage participants through multiple means of communication, and meetings are an essential part of the process. A lot of preparation is needed in advance and in follow-up to each meeting. For example, modelling issues must be carefully researched before they are presented to the community so everyone is capable of providing an informed opinion. Then decisions must be implemented and properly documented in Wikidata.

Questions: “do you have an idea of how many of these events for you plan to run or a or a general schedule for these activities during the grant period? Could this be incorporated in the metrics table, even as an approximation?”

Answers: We are making plans to hold the datathon from April 25th to May 2nd. There will be 7 official video conference events in English and French. We also anticipate that a few “off” activities may be added at the initiative of members of the community.

Since data enrichment activities are dependent on the number of batch uploads and whether or not the data partner will want to hold them, we can’t say for sure how many of these activities we will hold. We anticipate that we may hold up to three data enrichment activities in the spring and as many in the fall.

The metrics table was adapted to include these indicators.

Question: “One regular activity you have planned is to meet regularly with performing arts communities/organizations to address modelling challenges and support their engagement with the movement. Do you have specific goals or outcomes around these meetings related to the lesson exchange / reaching certain milestones in building agreement / building more awareness around how partners can engage with the movement?”

Answers: These challenges are typically encountered by members of the community over the course of batch uploads or during manual data population. Some other times, modelling issues are proactively identified in advance of a workshop or a community engagement activity. For example, recent activities are focusing on achieving more ontologic clarity with venues/buildings concepts in preparation for the datathon.

Our goals in this area are very much process-oriented. We always take time to research the issue (i.e. run queries, examine how properties and classes are being used by the community, compare Wikipedias, compare external authority files). We attempt to have preliminary discussions prior to the meeting. And we don’t rush towards a solution: if more time is needed we can revisit the challenge over subsequent meetings. If and when consensus is reached, then we implement any necessary changes and we document the decision in the appropriate WikiProject as well as in talk pages. If we do this process well and carefully, then we are content no matter what the outcome is: status quo isn’t a flashy outcome, but sometimes it’s a much better decision than making careless changes.

With regards to specific milestones, we anticipate modelling advancements and data quality enhancements in the following areas:

• We have a lot of work to do to disentangle items that conflate performing arts buildings and organizations - and most of this work has to be performed manually rather than with bots. We are counting on the datathon to significantly improve the situation.
• We are encountering datasets that include a mix of information on performing arts occupations and practices at a level of granularity not yet described in Wikidata. We have to agree on best practices to state areas of specialization. We also need to undertake further consultation and research to clearly define and name practices based on Indigenous Traditional Knowledge.
• A few LODEPA partners are working on a controlled vocabulary for performing arts organizations that is mapped with industry classifications. Once this vocabulary is completed and tested, it will have to be implemented in Wikidata, at which point consultations with members of the WikiProject are likely to be needed.
• Similarly, when the W3C Performing Arts Information Representation Community Group releases the first version of its harmonized ontology, it will have to be implemented in Wikidata. We will have to rely on international members of the WikiProject to assist with the translation of labels and descriptions for key concepts and properties.

In terms of building awareness and engaging partners with the movement, we are regularly making presentations and sharing lessons learned at conferences and other gatherings in order to attract new participants to our regular workshop series and to our WikiProject/LODEPA meetups. In the last year alone, CAPACOA, Conseil québécois du théâtre and LaCogency held 15 such events reaching 390 participants (excluding the Wikidata workshop series). We also continue to actively reach out to associations that might accept to upload their directory/catalog information, and we publish blog posts such as this one and an upcoming series of posts dedicated to Wikimedia Commons. But we have to remain realistic in our expectations for participation in the quarterly meetups and in the WikiProject Performing arts: very few people have the time, energy and knowledge of RDF modelling to tackle the kind of wicked challenges that this group grapples with. That is why we only anticipate a total of 15 unique participants at our quarterly meetups. It doesn’t seem like a lot. But it actually is.

Question: “What ethical practices around the representation of people does CAPACOA use when working together with partners as well as what information it integrates into Wikidata? For example, are there practices that could help prevent the inclusion of a former name of a transgender performing artist to avoid deadnaming and misgendering? Are there other practices you use that can help prevent other issues concerning personality rights?”

We load to Wikidata information about performing artists, creators and other contributors to performing arts works. These are professionals who already have some degree of public profile and who expect to be publicly credited for their contributions to performing arts works. Being present in Wikidata and stated as a contributor to performing arts productions is consistent with the aspiration that most performing artists have for the public recognition of their professional accomplishments.

This being said, we do not make assumptions about any artist’s desire for a public profile and we take every precaution to go above and beyond what would be expected under different personality rights in Canadian jurisdictions.

Every upload of artist information begins with outreach to membership associations who maintain public directories and catalogs featuring their members or their works. Membership in these associations is a form of filtering criteria confirming that the artist is professionally active and wishes to be recognized as such by their peers. Presence of these artists in a public directory confirms that the person wishes to be publicly acknowledged as an artist.

We typically load to Wikidata only information that is already publicly available in a directory or catalog. Yet, even if the information is already public, we assist the association so it can inform their members prior to the upload and give them the opportunity to opt out.

In certain cases, we do access information that is provided by the members to the association but that is not shared in the public members directory. In these cases, we consult with the association to determine if the disclosure of this information is likely to be deriving individual or collective benefits to their members. And then, we assist the association with the designing of an opt-in consent policy. The CAPACOA Membership Open Data Strategy is one example of such a policy. We are also currently developing a similar policy for members of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance. In addition to Canadian laws, this policy takes into account principles of Indigenous data sovereignty, as well as the CARE principles, and the guiding principles of the First Nations Data Governance Strategy.

By the time we proceed with the upload of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance dataset, we will have consulted with Indigenous artists for more than a year to determine whether and how they would like their information to be represented in Wikidata. The final mapping of the IPAA dataset to Wikidata will be vetted with the IPAA Grand Council (the association’s governing body). We believe we have held this dialogue in a careful and respectful manner, and we are very happy with the trust relationship that we have established with IPAA and their members.

When naming Indigenous Peoples or referring to Traditional Knowledge in Wikidata disambiguating descriptions, we follow the guidelines of Elements of Indigenous Styles, by Gregory Younging.

We do not upload self-identified or inferred gender identities to Wikidata. Rather, we invite performing artists to state their gender identity directly in Wikidata, if they are comfortable doing so.

We do not anticipate issues with deadnaming, because we access current data from associations who require their members to renew their membership and to update their member profile on an annual basis. Now, most associations that we partner with are minting their members’ unique IDs based on their first name - last name strings. As part of our outreach, we do stress the benefit of adopting opaque persistent identifiers, precisely to avoid problems such as deadnaming. Fjjulien (talk) 22:52, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Alliances Fund Program Funding approved in the amount of 34,800 CAD

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 34,800 CAD with a grant term starting 8 March 2022 and ending 31 December 2022. For clarity, the start date was adjusted in order to support the requirements of our grant agreement process. If more time is needed to complete the proposed work, we are happy to extend the proposed end date during your grant period.

The United States and Canada Regional Committee is happy to continue supporting CAPACOA in this extension of its prior work involving outreach to organizations and individuals in the performing arts, collaboration with relevant databases in an open data initiative, and to support more complete and better quality content on Wikidata in this domain. The committee highlighted several strengths of the proposal, including:

• that the outreach efforts in this project are both wide in terms of the sheer number of institutions it will collaborate with, but selective in terms of targeting specific thematic areas and communities that match its strategic goals. It is also exciting to see the project growing in scope.

• that the proposed activities will demonstrate and teach the value of publishing open data in Wikidata to a significant number of organizations and institutions, some of which may be new to the Wikimedia movement.

• the ongoing, thoughtful approaches CAPACOA is taking with respect to its efforts to elevate the needs of indigineous peoples in their work and how best to represent artists from these communities. This includes both working directly with indigineous librarians and artists, relevant partner organizations, and working closely with these communities to ensure that indigineous information is represented in an accurate and supportive manner.

We appreciate your engagement with us and look forward to learning about your work and outcomes in continuation of a promising structured data initiative. On behalf of the committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

We are very thankful for the support of the Wikimedia Foundation and for the supportive comments of the committee!

We appreciate the opportunity to extend the proposed end date. We would like to request that the end date be extended to March 31, 2023. Fjjulien (talk) 16:32, 1 March 2022 (UTC)